Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 387
| in the ship-building trust case as to what it is that ails Wall Street, would have given everybody all the information he could wish. The President is not, Congress is not, making war upon corporations, upon capital. They are trying to hold them—through publicity, by compelling them to obey the laws their smaller competitors have to bow to, and in any other lawful and reasonable way—to such responsibility that they shall not become a power full of peril to the people and to themselves. For that might mean much and grave mischief,—would mean, indeed, unless the people were willing to abdicate, which I think they are not. That mischief I should like to see averted. |
| “It is not designed to restrict or control the fullest liberty of legitimate business action,”—I quote from the President’s last message,—and none such can follow. “Publicity can do no harm to the honest corporation. The only corporation that has cause to dread it is the corporation which shrinks from the light, and about the welfare of such we need not be over-sensitive. The work of the Department of Commerce and Labor has been conditioned |